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Quarterly earnings calls present an opportunity for businesses to share how their long-term financial performance is tied to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. They can overcome obstacles to discussing ESG in these calls by laying the groundwork for interest in ESG, adapting the call schedule, explaining and reporting on the return on ESG investment, developing cross-functional collaborations, and staging the call as theater.

Managers often go through invisible leadership transitions, with additions to the scope of their roles without any changes in their official positions. Survey results show that leaders experience such transitions as 27% more difficult to navigate than formal ones, due to a lack of authority, difficulties in communicating effectively, and insufficient opportunities for self-improvement. The authors offer four key steps that can help leaders through the transition.

Leaders driving transformation often focus too much on how employees' tasks will change but this is less of a hurdle for workers than dealing with the threat to the informal roles they've established. Major transitions cause personal disruption along three different dimensions: role adjustment, task learning, and emotional engagement. To better manage transformative change, leaders need to focus not only on how their own roles need to adapt, but also help employees adapt to new identities.

Businesses have lacked robust tools to detect, measure, and manage smells in a scientific way until now. Two emerging branches of digital olfaction technology one focused on the digital detection and analysis of different odors, and the other on the digital transmission and re-creation of smells could potentially revolutionize a range of industries. The authors outline a variety of use cases for olfactory technologies, along with actions businesses can take to capitalize on them.

On March 19, 2020, as Covid-19 swept across the world, Bourla challenged everyone at Pfizer and its partner BioNTech--a German company focused on cancer immunotherapies--to "make the impossible possible": develop a vaccine more quickly than anyone ever had before, ideally within six months and certainly before the end of the year. Less than eight months later, on Sunday, November 8, they discovered that they had succeeded: Their combined second- and third-phase trials showed a 95% efficacy rate. In the spring, thanks to their work and that of the other companies whose vaccines have been authorized, 300 million doses should be available around the world. It took a moon-shot challenge, out-of-the-box thinking, intercompany cooperation, liberation from bureaucracy, and, most of all, hard work from everyone at Pfizer and BioNTech to accomplish what they did in 2020. Organizations of any size or in any industry can learn from these strategies to solve their own problems and to produce important work that benefits a broad swath of society.

Since the pandemic, companies have adopted the technologies of virtual work remarkably quickly--and employees are seeing the advantages of more flexibility in where and when they work. As leaders recognize what is possible, they are embracing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reset work using a hybrid model. To make this transition successfully, they'll need to design hybrid work arrangements with individual human concerns in mind, not just institutional ones. That requires companies to approach the problem from four different perspectives: (1) jobs and tasks; (2) employee preferences; (3) projects and workflows; and (4) inclusion and fairness. Leaders also need to conceptualize new work arrangements along two axes: place and time. Millions of workers around the world this year have made a sudden shift from being place-constrained (working in the office) to being place-unconstrained (working anywhere). Employees have also experienced a shift along the time axis, from working synchronously with others 9 to 5 to working asynchronously whenever they choose. If leaders and managers can successfully make the transition to an anywhere, anytime model, the result will be work lives that are more purposeful and productive.

If you're launching a business, the odds are against you: Two-thirds of start-ups never show a positive return. Unnerved by that statistic, a professor of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School set out to discover why. Based on interviews and surveys with hundreds of founders and investors and scores of accounts of entrepreneurial setbacks, his findings buck the conventional wisdom that the cause of start-up failure is either the founding team or the business idea. The author found six patterns that doomed ventures. Two were especially common: "Bad bedfellows." Other parties besides the founders--like employees, strategic partners, and investors--can all play a major role in a firm's demise. Quincy Apparel, for instance, was undone by weak support from its investors and factory partners and inflexible employees. "False starts." Many overlook a crucial step in the lean start-up process: researching customer needs before testing products. Like Triangulate, an online dating start-up, they keep rushing to launch fully functional offerings that don't fit any market needs. The good news is, firms can avoid that pitfall by rigorously defining the problem they want to solve, getting one-on-one feedback from potential customers, and validating concepts with real customers in real-world settings.

As companies respond to intensifying competitive pressures and challenges, they ask more and more of their employees. But organizations often have very little to show for the efforts of their talented and engaged workers. By selecting fewer initiatives with greater impact, companies can make their strategies more powerful. A strategic initiative is worthwhile only if it does one or more of the following: It creates value for customers by raising their willingness to pay. As your company finds ways to innovate or to improve existing products, the maximum price people will be willing to pay for the offering rises. It creates value for employees by making work more attractive. Offering better jobs lowers the minimum compensation that you have to offer to attract talent to your business. It creates value for suppliers by reducing their operating cost. As suppliers' costs go down, the lowest price they would be willing to accept for their goods falls. As companies expand the total amount of value created for their customers, employees, and suppliers, they position themselves for enduring financial success.

Many large companies fail to pay enough attention to their leadership pipelines and succession practices. That leads to excessive turnover at the top and destroys a significant amount of value--close to $1 trillion a year among the S&P 1500 alone, say the authors of this article. The biggest costs are underperformance at companies that hire ill-suited external CEOs, the loss of intellectual capital in the C-suites of organizations that executives leave behind, and for companies promoting from within, the lower performance of ill-prepared successors. Companies and their boards can (and must) do better. The solution isn't that complicated: Firms need to start succession planning well before they think they need to; make sure they identify and develop rising stars; appoint the most promising executives to the board to help prepare them to take on the top job; and look at both internal and external candidates. In addition, when working with search consultants, firms should avoid perverse incentives like contingency and percentage fees.

Large digital multisided platforms (MSPs) such as Amazon, Alibaba, and Apple's App Store have made it much easier for sellers to reach new customers, but as thousands of companies large and small have discovered, conducting business on them carries significant risks and costs. MSPs sometimes exploit sellers' dependency on them in various subtle and not-so-subtle ways. They raise fees. They change their recommendation algorithms to put more emphasis on price. They require sellers to advertise to maintain visibility in search results. They compete against sellers by imitating their products. They impose restrictions on the prices sellers can set outside of the MSP. And they change their rules and design in ways that weaken sellers' relationships with their customers. But all is not lost, say the authors. Sellers can employ four strategies to build viable businesses on platforms. They can develop and invest in direct channels, use platforms mainly as showrooms, go deep with highly specialized offerings or go broad with many different offerings, and wage public relations and lobbying campaigns to curb platforms' power.

Most companies are struggling to realize artificial intelligence's potential to completely transform the way they do business. The problem is, they typically apply AI in a long list of discrete uses, an approach that doesn't produce consequential change. Yet trying to overhaul the whole organization with AI all at once is simply too complicated to be practical. What's the solution? Using AI to reimagine one entire core business process, journey, or function end to end, say three McKinsey consultants. That allows each AI effort to build off the previous one by, say, reusing data or enhancing capabilities for a common set of stakeholders. An airline, for example, focused on its cargo function, and a telecom provider on its process for managing customer value. Scaling up AI involves four steps: (1) Identify an area where AI will make a big difference reasonably quickly and there are multiple interconnected activities and opportunities to share technology. (2) Staff the team with the right people and remove the obstacles to their success. (3) Reimagine business as usual, working back from a key goal and then exploring in detail how to achieve it. (4) Support new AI-based processes with organizational changes, such as interdisciplinary collaboration and agile mindsets.

Most companies say they're committed to advancing women into leadership roles. What they may fail to recognize, though, is that systemic barriers are holding women back. As a result, women remain disadvantaged at every stage of their employment and underrepresented in positions of power. Drawing on their own research and the scholarship of others, the authors describe common forms of gender discrimination in seven key areas of talent management: attracting candidates, hiring employees, integrating newcomers into the organization, developing employees, assessing performance, managing compensation and promotion, and retaining employees. Companies can level the playing field by identifying patterns of gender bias in the way they treat people and then systematically making appropriate changes. They can, for example, avoid loaded language in job postings, anonymize the resumes of applicants, cultivate an inclusive culture, increase women's access to mentors, set clear criteria for salary offers and raises, and destigmatize flexible work arrangements. Research has shown the value of all these practices in fully leveraging women's talents.

For two decades progressive thinkers have argued that a more sustainable form of capitalism would arise if companies regularly measured and reported on their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. But although such reporting has become widespread, and some firms are deriving benefits from it, environmental damage and social inequality are still growing. This article, by Timberland's former COO, outlines the problems with both sustainability reporting and sustainable investing. The author discusses nonstandard metrics, insufficient auditing, unreliable ESG ratings, and more. But real progress, he says, requires not just better measurement and reporting practices but also changes in regulations, investment incentives, and mindsets.

Everyone knows that success at work depends on being--and being seen as--both competent and likable. You need people to notice your growth and accomplishments while also enjoying your company. But if you draw attention to the value you've created, to ensure that managers and peers recognize it, you risk coming across as a shameless self-promoter. No one likes a braggart. In this article the author explains how to highlight your accomplishments at work without having it backfire. Drawing from a fascinating strain of laboratory research, she advises against several popular tactics such as "humblebragging" and "boomer­asking" (asking a question in the hope it will be reciprocated so that you can bring up your own accomplishments). Instead, she advises, recognize situations where self-promotion is socially acceptable (such as job interviews) and consider using a mentor or other agent to boast on your behalf.

Four recent books help readers smartly channel an increasingly common condition: "Trust Yourself," by Melody Wilding; "Chatter," by Ethan Kross; "Anxiety at Work," by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton; and "The Anxiety Toolkit," by Alice Boyes.

The star of the 2018 Oscar-winning documentary "Free Solo" talks about how he prepares for climbs, the way he thinks about risk, and what's next now that he has achieved his lifelong ambition to scale El Capitan.

Seemingly overnight, digital tools, models and platforms have emerged from their traditional back-office function to become an unstoppable strategic force, revolutionizing every industry-and the global pandemic has only accelerated this transformation. As a result, today's executives-many of whom have little expertise or training in this area-are faced with many more technology-driven conversations, ranging from new value propositions to start-up investments to disruptive competitors. The result: they often get defensive about their ability to contribute. The authors, experts in difficult conversations, provide tools that will enable leaders to support the digital evolution of their organizations.

Whether we are willing to admit it or not, everyone has cognitive biases. The challenge is knowing how to work around them to achieve optimal thinking. In this wide-ranging interview, Dr. Jay Gordon Cone argues that one of the most pervasive biases is confirmation bias, which leads us to quickly notice and accept things that are consistent with our underlying beliefs-and to ignore or reject things that are not. This is of particular concern right now, because in an increasingly polarized world, we crave the comfort of having our worldview reinforced and embraced more than ever. The danger comes when we overlook evidence that we might not have all the facts-or we might just be plain wrong. Dr. Cone, who has advised The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, GE and PepsiCo, provides practical tools for fighting confirmation bias and eradicating closed-mindedness-and puts readers on the path to maintaining a balanced worldview.

The former Chairman and CEO of BMO Financial Group recounts his experience leading one of the world's most successful banks through three separate crises, from the 1990 real-estate market collapse to the 2001 dot-com bubble to the 2008 global financial crisis. In this excerpt from his book, Personal Account: 25 Tales About Leadership, Learning and Legacy from a Lifetime at Bank of Montreal, he shares proven strategies for crisis leadership and his reasons for an optimistic view that "people of character and resolve will emerge to guide us in the months and years ahead". And while the long-term economic implications of the global pandemic are not yet known, he shows that lessons from earlier crises can guide those responsible for the world's recovery.

Fostering the well-being and resiliency of employees has long been an important element of the best business models. Now, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become even more of a necessity. The authors, senior leaders with Accenture, describe their research showing that by meeting six fundamental human needs, companies can unlock significant workforce potential. They also share six 'sweet-spot practices' that leaders should embrace to get the most out of each and every employee while simultaneously fostering their well-being.